Filling the pie hole

Few things are quite as good as pie. Whiffies Fried Pies, a cart located at Southeast 12th Avenue and Hawthorne Boulevard, seems to understand this. Their brand of handheld deliciousness—both in dessert and dinner flavors—is some of the best cart eating our city has to offer.

But sometimes, there can be too much of a good thing. And on Oct. 6, after nine-and-a-half pies, my body was done. Full up.

With a crowd of 20 people chanting my name, I leaned over a garbage can and released a substance from my stomach that was the consistency of tar—mostly made up of caramel-colored pie crust. It looked a lot like baby poop.

See, Whiffies has an informal competition they call “pie champ,” where contestants try to eat as many of their signature pies in an hour as possible. The record currently stands at nine, held by someone named David. I hate you, David.

Here’s what I learned from my public display of gluttony:

1. Know your choices
I went into my mass eating unprepared. What flavors should I eat? I chose at random. This ended up hurting me, as the raspberry and apple selections were too powerful to stomach in tandem with other flavors. The pumpkin cream was pretty much perfect, though.

2. The reasonable limit of pie eating is four
Pies one through four went down in about 10 minutes, and I felt fine. The fifth pie was when things really started getting unpleasant. At that point, I felt like a turkey at Thanksgiving dealing with an over-enthusiastic stuffing lover.

3. Audience is key
Since the main reason I ate these pies was because I like attention, I was perfectly happy to have a large audience screaming at me. Besides, eating contests aren’t really something you do alone. Unless you’re a fat person—then you call it dinner.

4. Nine pies is a lot of food
Estimates put my caloric intake of Whiffies pies at around 10,000. That’s several days’ worth of food. Appropriately, I didn’t eat for 54 hours after my pie champ attempt.

5. I would not do this again
There is literally no compelling reason to participate in an eating contest. The best possible result is a little bit of infamy and an awful stomachache. In my case, all I got was the latter. Puking pie tar is not fun.

Good food was not meant to be consumed this way.